As anything scales too effectively - from fashion to restaurants to music - the market opens for more non-scalable alternatives. Once Starbucks opens on every block, many of us crave the artisanal coffee shop. Once our favorite Italian restaurant becomes a chain of three, we grow tired of it. Why? First, so much of what we buy and do is tied up in... See more

Second, because we can mass-produce “flawless” content, “flawless” content now feels cheap. It’s supply and demand: when you can generate 100s of blemish-free photos, podcast “recordings” without a single grammatical error, and detailed “research reports” in seconds, the value of these outputs drop to zero. AI made efficiency so simple that... See more

A humanism that responds to the collapse of Big Authenticity will be sexier . As Magdalene Taylor recently wrote, “Real things and actual human experiences are hot, even in the written form. They have a libidinal energy that’s been drained from us in the current technological era. And we’re going to want to get that energy back.”